Dangerous Terrain: Re-Reading the Landmines Ban through the Social Worlds of the RMA

Abstract

The bases of legitimacy in recourse to war have, in recent years, come to turn vitally on meaningful discrimination between combatants and noncombatants. Concurrently, the remarkable successes of the movement to ban antipersonnel landmines and the follow-on ban on cluster munitions have likewise been predicated on this same arbiter of legitimacy, marking specific kinds of weapons as bad for their inherent indiscriminacy. This article begins by exploring sources of popular expectations that make official claims to discriminacy seem plausible. In particular, the role of popular representation is considered for its foregrounding of the technological feats of precision-guided munitions in ways that mystify ethico-political questions about their use. It is argued that this, more than any objective properties of weapons themselves, has been the truly revolutionary aspect of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The implications of/in this for/by disarmament advocacy of the sort exemplified in the civil society campaign to ban landmines are weighed.

Notes

Officially, the ‘Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction.’

The 1987 Soviet–US agreement to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons and the Chemical Weapons Convention which entered into force a decade later are but two then-recent examples.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions, signed by 107 states in December 2008, entered into force on 1 August 2010.

For a thoroughgoing exploration, see Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Neil Cooper, ‘The Pariah Agenda and New Labour's Ethical Arms Sales Policy’, in Richard Little and Mark Wickham-Jones (eds), New Labour's Foreign Policy: A Moral Crusade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.158.

Martin Shaw, The New Western way of War (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp.87–8.

Following Umberto Eco, hyperreality refers to the apparently authentic expression and experience of a reality that has never truly existed. Umberto Eco, William Weaver (trans.), Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986).

Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard and Peter Paret (trans. and eds), On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). In the original German, Clausewitz wrote, ‘Krieg ist die Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.’ While ‘Politik’ could be translated as either ‘policy’ or ‘politics’, read in context it is clear that Clausewitz intends the latter, encapsulating not only the ends/means calculus of policy but also a broader terrain of more visceral motives and appetites.

See Andrew Latham, ‘War Transformed: A Braudelian Perspective on the “Revolution in Military Affairs”’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002), pp.231–66.

Max Boot, ‘The New American Way of War’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 4 (2003), pp.41–59.

Though the Gulf War did see major confrontations on ‘battlefields’ as traditionally understood, the possibilities unlocked by relatively reliable standoff weapons also allowed the US military to very selectively take the war to particular spaces at moments of its choosing and in ways that defied containment to a definable field of battle. Even the parcelled spatial contiguity of mass bombing raids of the sort carried out since the Second World War was exceeded by the ability to accurately deliver a weapon against a specific target from distances well beyond the range of anything available in the Iraqi arsenal.

See, for example, Captain Edward A. Smith, Jr, ‘Putting it through the Right Window’, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 121, No. 6 (1995), p.38.

See Harlan Ullman and James Wade, Jr, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 1996).

The salience of this has been tellingly evinced in other equally striking developments since the end of the Cold War, perhaps most notably in the emergent norm of humanitarian intervention whose most explicit articulation has come as the ‘Responsibility to Protect.’ For a detailed treatment of the ethical bases of noncombatant immunity in war, see Igor Primoratz, ‘Civilian Immunity in War’, Philosophical Forum, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2005), pp.41–58. On Iraqi civilians' right to immunity in the Gulf War, see in particular pp.50–53. The case made here applies equally well to the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p.8; J. Marshall Beier, ‘Discriminating Tastes: “Smart” Bombs, Non-Combatants, and Notions of Legitimacy in Warfare’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2003), pp.415–19.

David R. Mets, ‘The Long Search for a Surgical Strike: Precision Munitions and the Revolution in Military Affairs’, Research and Education Paper No.12, College of Aerospace Doctrine, 2001, p.39.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.65.

On the US Army's inclusion of ‘public affairs’ as part of ‘information operations’, see Kenneth Payne, ‘The Media as an Instrument of War’, Parameters, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2005), pp.84–5. For a disapproving perspective on US military planners' sensitivity to the political consequences of civilian casualties, see Karl P. Mueller, ‘Politics, Death, and Morality in US Foreign Policy’, Aerospace Power Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2000), pp.12–16.

A concern whose enduring relevance has recently been signalled anew amidst political fallout from the 2010 Wikileaks revelations about underreporting of noncombatant casualty figures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Brendan R. McLane, ‘Reporting from the Sandstorm: An Appraisal of Embedding’, Parameters, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2004), p.80; see also Sydney H. Schanberg, ‘Censoring for Political Security’, Washington Journalism Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1991), pp.23–26, p.53.

Fred S. Hoffman, ‘The Panama Press Pool Deployment: A Critique’, in Lloyd J. Matthews (ed.), Newsmen and National Defense: Is Conflict Inevitable? (Washington, DC: Brasseys, 1991), pp.92–3.

See Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

That this same media fascination was not seen in more recent wars is revealing of the extent to which we now take PGMs and their capabilities very much for granted. Indeed, in 2003 attention was much more devoted to the surprising circumstance that organized Iraqi resistance did not collapse quite as immediately as we had come to expect.

Gulf War trading cards profiled particular weapon systems in the same manner as they did political and military leaders. Briefing video content taken from the perspective of weapons descending to targets that gave no indication of human presence was also featured. Underscoring the move into everyday material culture and popular consciousness, some fifteen years after the war itself one company that produced and marketed Gulf War trading cards had linked a reissued set as ‘pop culture > flashback’ on its website where it was featured amongst other card sets devoted to popular television series, movies, and pop music stars. See: http://www.topps.com/Entertainment/Flashback/index.html. An ‘Enduring Freedom’ card set released in 2001 featured familiar images of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on some cards while once again profiling weapons systems on others.

An accompanying placard notes that Tomahawks were ‘used extensively in the 1991 Persian Gulf War’ and that the display piece was a gift from Tomahawk manufacturer General Dynamics. The same placard contrasts the accuracy of the Tomahawk with the decidedly inaccurate German V-1, noting the latter's extensive use against cities during the Second World War. The implication of meaningful discriminacy between combatants and noncombatants in the case of Tomahawk use is palpable.

A more apt characterization than ‘agent’ is ‘actant’ as elaborated by Bruno Latour and wherein the weapon together with those who frame and undertake its operation form parts of a larger corporate whole producing new mediations of social worlds. By this view, a more complicated picture emerges in which properties and characteristics of nonhuman and human actants become so intertwined as to make the characteristics of each and a discrete, disaggregated subject indistinguishable. See Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.174–215. In the visual and discursive economies of the RMA, however, this is mystified such that the operant construction is that of weapon as agent.

See United States, General Accounting Office, ‘Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air War’, GAO/PEMD-96-10 (1996); Tim Wiener, ‘“Smart” Weapons Were Overrated, Study Concludes’. New York Times, 9 July 1996, pp.A1, A7; Fred Kaplan, ‘US Bombs not Much “Smarter”’, The Boston Globe, 20 February 1998, p.A1.

See, for example, Nathan A. Canestaro, ‘Legal and Policy Constraints on the Conduct of Aerial Precision Warfare’, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2004), pp.431–84; Frederic L. Borch, ‘Targeting After Kosovo: Has the Law Changed for Strike Planners?’ Naval War College Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2003), pp.64–81.

Derek Gregory, ‘War and Peace’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2010), p.170.

See Ted McKenna, ‘No Time to Spare’, Journal of Electronic Defense, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2005), p.10.

Miguel de Larrinaga and Claire Turenne Sjolander, ‘(Re)presenting Landmines from Protector to Enemy: The Discursive Framing of a New Multilateralism’, in Maxwell A. Cameron, Robert J. Lawson, and Brian W. Tomlin (eds), To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.369–79.

Having initially seemed amenable to the idea of a ban and later indicating that it would accede once a workable alternative to antipersonnel landmines was available, the position of the United States is exemplary in this regard. On the more complicated but still pertinent case of India, see J. Marshall Beier, ‘Siting Indiscriminacy: India and the Global Movement to Ban Landmines’, Global Governance, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2002), pp.305–21. On the role of the taboo in reversing Japan's opposition to the ban, see Kenki Adachi, ‘Why Japan Signed the Mine Ban Treaty: The Political Dynamics Behind the Decision’, Asian Survey, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2005), pp.397–413.

Richard Price, ‘Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines’, International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 3 (1998), pp.631–37.

On the landmines taboo and its broader implications, see Richard Price, ‘Compliance with International Norms and the Mines Taboo’, in Cameron, Lawson, and Tomlin (eds), To Walk Without Fear (note 31), pp.340–64.

See, for example, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ‘Landmine-Related Injuries, 1993–1996’, JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 278, No. 8 (1997), pp.724–26; Mary H. Cooper, ‘Banning Land Mines: Should the U.S. Support a Total Global Ban?’, CQ Researcher, Vol. 7, No. 30 (1997), pp.699–719.

See, for example, the cover images of the ICBL's annual Landmine Monitor, where child landmine victims have figured prominently.

de Larrinaga and Turenne Sjolander, ‘(Re)presenting Landmines from Protector to Enemy’ (note 31), pp.376–7.

Derek Gregory, ‘The Death of the Civilian?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 24, No. 5 (2006), p.634.

Andrew Latham, ‘Global Cultural Change and the Transnational Campaign to Ban Antipersonnel Landmines: A Research Agenda’, YCISS Occasional Paper no.62, Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 2000.

This emergent technology threatens noncombatants and humanitarian deminers alike with its promise of a new generation of ‘smart’ mines that will communicate with one another and reposition themselves accordingly to resolve any breach in the minefield. See David Marcoux, ‘The Advent of Self-Healing Mines’, The Humanist, Vol. 63, No. 4 (2003), pp.35–6.

J. Marshall Beier and Ann Denholm Crosby, ‘Harnessing Change for Continuity: The Play of Political and Economic Forces behind the Ottawa Process’, in Cameron, Lawson, and Tomlin (eds), To Walk Without Fear (note 31), pp.269–91; Cooper, ‘The Pariah Agenda and New Labour's Ethical Arms Sales Policy’ (note 5).

The July 2002 air strike that killed as many as 48 guests at a wedding in Afghanistan and injured scores of others is instructive in this regard. In this instance responsibility has been tied to the celebratory firing of small arms by some of the guests. See ‘US justifies Afghan Wedding Bombing’, BBC News, 7 September 2002, at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2242428.stm

See ‘An Open Letter to President Clinton’, New York Times, 3 April 1996, p.A9.

Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).

Ibid., p.204.

Ibid., p.199; emphasis in original.

Ibid., p.204.